+
After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
+Debian Edu and Skolelinux
+community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
+Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
+this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
+administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
+conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.
+
+
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
+
+
I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
+in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
+university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
+Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
+IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
+got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
+labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
+the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
+training is anyway very important
+
+
I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
+SPSE school (secondary) is a very
+special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
+all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
+recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
+
+
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
+project?
+
+
Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
+already several years ago. But since the system was still not
+Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
+use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
+next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
+hole.
+
+
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?
+
+
Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
+very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
+the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
+engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
+and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
+can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
+platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
+head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
+hassle.
+
+
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
+Edu?
+
+
The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
+flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
+there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
+need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
+devices that have specific software packages for another specific
+distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
+Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
+and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)
+
+
Which free software do you use daily?
+
+
I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
+mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
+combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
+Perceus
+has the same...
+
+
For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
+only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
+something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
+statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.
+
+
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
+get schools to use free software?
+
+
I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
+cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
+just because they are normally not open to change.
+
+
Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
+to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
+don't.
+
+
We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
+laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
+we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
+machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
+reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
+repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
+Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.
+
+
+
+